Guest post: My year in Java, by Trisha Gee

Trisha Gee, Java Evangelist at 10gen and Assistant Organiser of the London Java Community, on her highlights of the year and hopes for the future.

Well,
it’s December 31 so it must be the end of the year. Which makes it
the fastest-disappearing year on record.

From a Java perspective, with no major technology releases this
year – Java 7 is so last year, and everyone’s using it already,
right? – 2012 has felt very focused on the community: people,
developers, user groups. The London Java
Community’s Adopt a JSR
and Adopt
OpenJDK programs have gone global, capturing the imagination of
both “the establishment” (for example, the JCP and Oracle) and
every day developers. Both programs have provided a real bridge
between language designers and those who use it in anger all day
every day, and both sides are happy to be closer together. Never
before have we had such great opportunities to influence the
language we work with.

Personally I’ve had an amazing year too. In March, I presented solo
at an international conference for the very first time. Now, this
year alone, I’ve done 12 presentations at 7 international
conferences, been on several panels in London and internationally,
given my first half-day workshop, presented at three user groups
that weren’t the LJC, and I’ve done my first couple of webinars.
All this began thanks to the encouragement and support of
several key people last year (thanks Martin, Martin,
and Martijn… wait
a minute…). This year I said “yes” to everything (What
Could Possibly Go Wrong?), especially if it seemed scary. I
never did start writing a book though, which was my original 2012
resolution.

To top off the year, I moved jobs into what seems to be my perfect
role. I will forever be grateful to LMAX for everything I learnt
and everyone I met working there, but I’m looking forward to
different types of challenges presented by 10gen.

Next year should be another big year for Java – Java 8 is coming!
I’m looking forward to sneaking lambdas into everything I
can. And in the London Java Community we’re hoping to run a
bunch of hack days before and after the launch to get developers
comfortable with the exciting new features available.

Looking to 2013

I’m not going to make any big 2013 predictions in terms of
technology, these are always wrong almost immediately, and serve
little purpose other than providing something for us all to laugh
at this time next year. I do think Java and other JVM
languages will continue to go from strength to strength, I
do think “cloudy” platforms are not only here to stay but will
become more and more the normal way of operating, I think that
horribly overused term Big Data will continue to be bandied around
willy nilly, and organisations will continue to try to get better
at storing and making sense of all that data. I also predict that
something we didn’t expect will happen, and we’ll look at it and
think “why didn’t we see that coming?”.

I have a number of my own personal resolutions for next year, of
course, which I will feel free to ignore if something more
interesting turns up:

Get more involved in schools/mentoring. I believe we
should invest in our future, I believe in all of us being role
models. With new moves to encourage UK schools to
create their own ICT/Computer Science curriculum, I believe
there’s never been a better time to get involved in giving kids the
type of technology education they deserve.

Contribute to a major release of the MongoDB Java Driver. It will be
awesome to have my name on my first open source project, and to
make (hopefully) improvements to something lots of developers
use.

Give a keynote at an international conference (I’m
open to invitations…?).

…and more of the same from this year:
presentations, user groups, blogging, workshops. Probably the two
conferences I’m looking forward to the most right now are QCon
London and Devoxx UK.

I foresee a lot of travel in my future, which is very
exciting.

And, if someone can add some more hours into each day, maybe I’ll
start that book.

Trisha Gee is a Java Evangelist at 10gen and Assistant
Organiser of the London Java Community. She tweets at @trisha_gee and blogs
regularly on Trisha’s
Ramblings. Photo of the London Eye by jtlondon.